CHAPTER 14
Throughout the working life of the Albuquerque Locomotive Repair Shops, employees there were known collectively as “shopmen.” Despite that designation, women also always made up part of the workforce. Usually, women filled what were traditionally office jobs, such as clerks, stenographers, and secretaries. In those capacities, women were employed in the master mechanic’s office, the timekeeper’s office, the car accountant’s office, and especially in the store-supply depot. Nevertheless, records from 1896 to 1950 show that there regularly were exceptional women who worked side by side with men on the shop floor. All such examples that we have located of women working directly in repairing and overhauling locomotives involved women classified as helpers, commonly machinist helpers. That put women in situations where precision metal working, application of brute force to parts and tools, and routine exposure to physical risk and sexual harassment were all part of the workday.
In 1919, of the four women working on the shop floor, two were single and two were married; three of them were machinist helpers and the fourth was an air brake repair helper. Another seventeen women did office work, eight of them in the storehouse office. Timely receipt of thousands of parts and bulk materials in quantities that met the pressing needs of scheduled maintenance and repairs was always critical to smooth operation of the Shops. Female employees were frequently charged with seeing that the store was fully stocked as a matter of routine.
Although we were not able to locate women to interview who had worked at the Albuquerque Locomotive Repair Shops, we did talk extensively with the daughter of a woman who worked at the AT&SF roundhouse in Winslow, Arizona. Helen Toya, a native of Seama village at Laguna Pueblo—and grandmother of Debra Haaland, US Representative from the First Congressional District in New Mexico—started working at the Winslow yards in the early 1920s, along with her husband Tony, who was from Jemez Pueblo. They had both been signed on by a Santa Fe recruiter during the March feast day at Laguna. At Winslow Helen worked many jobs, from cleaning locomotives to cleaning troop cars during World War II. She was foreman of the car cleaners and often worked the graveyard shift—midnight till 8:00 a.m. At times she also worked at La Posada, the Harvey House hotel in Winslow. For years Helen and Tony lived in the so-called Indian village near Winslow, which consisted of box-car homes. Each home was composed of two box cars joined together at right angles, forming a T. Some fifty Native families lived in the Winslow Indian Village. Helen’s daughter, Mary Toya, remembers that her family heated their box-car home with a wood stove. They would travel in the direction of the San Francisco Peaks near Flagstaff, Arizona, to cut their fuel wood. Eventually, the Toya family, along with one of Helen’s sisters, moved to Desert View Estates on the edge of Winslow. Tony, who also served in several different job classifications, finally retired from the AT&SF after fortyfive years, in 1969 or 1970.1
Because of the attention that has been paid in recent years to women who worked in manufacturing jobs during World War II (Rosie the Riveters), we gave special scrutiny to the employment information recorded in the Albuquerque City Directory for 1943, approximately in the middle of US involvement in the Second World War. Based on a 44 percent sample of the 1943 City Directory, we estimate that there were only eleven women working at the shops in 1943, almost all of them in office jobs as clerks and stenographers, while just two worked on the shop floor. One of those women on the floor was a machinist helper named Elisha H. Baker. Indicative of the low ratio of women to men at the Shops during the War is the accompanying photo from a war bond drive among the store department staff in the 1940s, which shows just two women and forty-eight male employees. Surprisingly, we found a lower rate of employment of women in the Albuquerque Locomotive Repair Shops for 1943 (eleven) than for either 1919 (twenty-one) or 1950 (nineteen).
Figure 14.1. Presentation of the Minute Man flag at Santa Fe Shops, June 1943. The award was to the staff of the store department for exemplary participation in a war bond drive. Note two women employees near the center of the photo. Photographer unknown. Courtesy of the Albuquerque Museum, Photo Archives, Catalog No. PA1980.184.686.
Meanwhile, the city directory listed many women as employed during 1943 in other lines of work in Albuquerque, especially as teachers, nurses, clerks, stenographers, and waitresses, but also in local and federal government jobs, in banks, and as telephone operators and bus drivers. More in line with our original expectations, there were also a few women employed in manufacturing. For example, the City Directory for 1943 lists four women working as welders and one as a sheet metal worker, but none of them were at the Locomotive Repair Shops.2
Despite a lack of readily available records of women working in the Albuquerque Shops in 1943, the AT&SF released a promotional film in 1944 that boasted about female shopworkers within the Santa Fe system generally. The narrator of the film, titled Loaded for War, proclaimed: “In ever increasing numbers women are helping the railroads to maintain their high standards of service to the nation. But don’t think that the only jobs women are performing are behind office desks. With thousands of rail employees going into the armed forces, women readily volunteered for heavier duties in the shops. They are holding down man-sized jobs and handling those jobs with comparable skill.”3
By comparison, during World War II, railway lines in Great Britain saw a huge influx of women into the workforce, including in service and repair shops. Historian Susan Major has recently shown, for example, that “during the war there had been 39,000 women working for LMS [London, Midland, and Scottish Railway], around 17 percent of the total staff.”4 At the time of the War, LMS was the largest commercial enterprise in the British Empire. The percentage of women railroad workers at LMS was close to the average for all British railroads, as determined in 1944, which was far higher than the comparable rate at the Albuquerque Locomotive Repair Shops. Nevertheless, there had been considerable grousing about female railroad workers by male staff on British railroads throughout the War.5
Rather than a verifiable surge in employment of women at the Albuquerque Shops during the War, we found a further increase in the number of Hispanic shopmen, a continuation of the trend that had held since the end of the first decade of the Shops’ existence. In 1943, according to the City Directory, 63.1 percent of AT&SF shopworkers in the categories of blacksmith, blacksmith apprentice, blacksmith helper, boilermaker, boilermaker apprentice, and boilermaker helper at Albuquerque were Spanish-surnamed. That compares to 28.8 percent Spanish-surnamed in 1919, 50.3 percent in 1925, and 63.1 percent in 1950. Tempering the sense of progress for Hispanos at the Shops through the years is the fact that in 1943 the vast majority of Hispanic shopmen (67 out of 87) were still found among the helpers, the lowest pay grade among machinists and boilermakers (see appendix 2).6
Ironically, the percentage of Hispanic shopmen at Albuquerque reached its zenith in the decade or so immediately preceding the end of steam locomotive repair and the collapse of employment for steam locomotive machinists and boilermakers of whatever ethnicity throughout the United States. The near-total lay-off of shopmen at Albuquerque in the mid-1950s was even more drastic and sudden than the piecemeal implosion of general manufacturing employment in the United States was three to four decades later.
Just as we had expected to find increased employment of shopwomen at Albuquerque during the World War II years, we also presumed that there were larger numbers of African Americans working at the Shops during the War. That, too, we did not find evidence for. Among on-the-road crews, positions as Pullman porters, Pullman maids, dining car servers, and baggage handlers had been and continued to be occupied overwhelmingly by African Americans during World War II.7 But throughout the nation, jobs relating to the repair and overhaul of steam locomotives remained largely closed to African Americans, with only occasional individuals finding places on the shop floor. That was the case at the Albuquerque Shops also throughout the steam era. Even though by the 1940s there was a very small increase in the number of African Americans working on the shop floor, they still made up only a tiny segment of the total workforce.
In 1919, the recorders for the Hudspeth Directory Company entered information about “race,” indicating “(c)” for “colored” for those included in the published directory. Leaving aside the question of how accurate or consistent the recorders were, tallying up the entries that included “(c)” provides a rough indication of the percentage of African American residents of Albuquerque who were employed as shopmen by the Santa Fe. Ten persons were identified in this way, all but one of whom served as helpers or laborers. The tenth individual, a man named George Austin, was a turntable operator at the roundhouse. With a total Shop workforce of about 1,195 at the time, this suggests that African American shopmen made up less than 1 percent of the workforce of the Albuquerque Locomotive Repair Shops in 1919.8
Figure 14.2. Group photo of the 1937 Albuquerque machine shop staff. Note the presence of at least 10 African Americans among the 206 workers pictured. An x was inked onto the photo above the head of machinist Bonifacio Shaw (fifth row from the bottom and fifth individual from the right). Photographer unknown. Courtesy of Patrick Trujillo, Shaw’s grandson.
We have no strictly comparable data for the period 1941–1945, but in seven unstaged photographs taken at the shops in 1943, we are able to distinguish by skin color nine men who appear to be African American out of a total of 188, which yields 4.8 percent African Americans out of that small sample of undetermined representativeness. Perhaps coincidentally, though, a single posed group photo of workers from the machine shop in 1937 reveals 10 out of 206 to be likely African Americans (again based solely on skin tone), giving a remarkably similar percentage of 4.9 percent. At the very least, taken together, the photos from 1937 and 1943 hint at a significant increase in the number of African American shopmen at Albuquerque between 1919 and 1937, but little change resulting from the onset of the World War.
For Albuquerque as a whole, US Census data show that during the 1940s the African American population jumped by 124 percent, a percentage increase that has since been exceeded only during the immediately subsequent decade of the 1950s, when the number of African Americans swelled by 192 percent. Since then, the African American population of Albuquerque has continued to grow, but it has not kept up with the general population growth of the city. Boosted first by air force and army activities, followed by work related to production of the atomic bomb, the population of Albuquerque as a whole exploded during the 1940s, climbing from nearly 36,000 in 1940 to just a shade under 97,000 in 1950.9
In sum, among women and minorities, only employment of Hispanic men increased significantly over the seventy-five years of work in steam locomotive repair at Albuquerque. For others, the changes in shop employment were very small and lacked sizeable trends.